Situationist Cybernetics. Researching AI’s impact on culture at the University of Cambridge Digital Humanities. Affiliated Researcher, Machine Visual Culture Research Group (Max Planck Institute). Critical but curious. Aim to be kind. cyberneticforests.com
So, I find it pretty problematic that the Canada Revenue Agency is recording conversations btwn citizens & agents for the purpose of training their AI. A recorded message informs you of this prior to speaking to an agent and there is no opting out. You have to give your SIN, DOB, address etc. 🤯☠️
Not sure what else to say except: wildly embarrassing.
Did an AI Music App Just Snitch on the Song of the Summer?Fenix Flexin’s hit song “Rubberz” has hip-hop fans arguing over whether it was generated by AI. Some say they have proof it’s machine-made, but will anyone care?www.wired.com
"The White House says its AI framework is done. It will not say what is in it. The framework gives the government a 30-day preview window on frontier models. The benchmarks are classified. The thresholds are classified. The framework itself is not classified, but it is not public either."
The White House says its AI framework is done. It will not say what is in it.The voluntary AI model evaluation framework met its August 1 deadline. The White House will not disclose its contents, who has seen it, or when companies will use it.thenextweb.com
There are two wolves. One always lies. One controls the lever of trolley track. They're in a state of superposition inside a box. On the trolley are infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters going to an infinite hotel. The trolley must first travel halfway, but before that a quarterway, and so on...
☀️ U T O P I A N ☀️ M E D I A ☀️ S T U D I E S ☀️ I am so proud of this work w/ Convergence. Kemper & I make the argument that many media scholars use utopian approaches in their research. But we just need to reflect on how to do it together, and do it well. journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....
Four baselines for academic conference attendance: 1) keep to your allocated speaking time. 2) everyone is clever; stand out by being warm & kind. 3) be interested in everyone equally - from postgrad to Prof to conference administrator to catering & hotel staff. 4) in Q&A, ask an actual question.
Fascinating experiment: current AI systems lack creativity to reliably pursue research arxiv.org/abs/2607.27191 - poor judgment about the bar for publishable research - uncreative responses in research design - ineffective backtracking from dead ends - poor resource awareness - instruction drift
Can AI agents conduct open-ended AI research? Early evidence from two case studiesForecasts of explosive AI progress hinge on AI agents automating AI research. But evidence on whether agents can carry out open-ended AI research is thin. Current evaluations either test agents on nar...arxiv.org
From the verbing of "text" to AI-generated "slop," writing is treated as an extractable resource. This talk asks how material practices such as printing, bookmaking, and hands-on work can still create friction. Ft. @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social at @rarebookschool.bsky.social
Matthew Kirschenbaum: "From text to .txt: Making Material Messes in a Sloppy World" (Malkin Lecture)Matthew Kirschenbaum delivered Rare Book School's 2026 Sol M. and Mary Ann O’Brian Malkin Endowed Lecture, "From text to .txt: Making Material Messes in a Sloppy World," at the University of Virginia…buff.ly
Everyone is wondering who caused this! The platform literally has a "Write with AI" button...
404 MediaFollowing 404 Media's reporting on how LinkedIn is full of AI slop, the platform is giving users a chance to report it when they see it. www.404media.co/linkedin-int...
Imagine thinking the first victim of AI has yet to pass... It's people of colour, women, people in the global south, the planet... How embarrassing!
The Irish TimesDavid McWilliams: The first victim of AI is the economy. Welcome to the 2030s
For me, LLMs are clearly powerful machines, but everything about their construction and deployment in society by the people constructing them appears oriented around achieving a political project that deeply conflicts with my values or a vision of a future I want to live in and dont have a choice in
NERV IRB CoordinatorThis is what is driving me nuts. So many posters around here keep haw-hawing about R’s in strawberry and clearly have NO idea that these are extremely powerful machines *already* that we have not yet figured out how to utilize fully. If we stopped development today, they’d still be astonishing
War now only occurs when the markets are closed is actually very cyberpunk
Openly bragging about committing cyber crimes and justifying it by *checks notes* being too incompetent to sandbox or air-gap your systems.
Eryk SalvaggioReally important to note that in no way shape or form did Anthropic’s models in this incident “escape containment,” and not just in the word-policing sort of way. The model stumbled through an open, misconfigured gap. From Anthropic’s incident report:
Hackers in America threatened with conspiracy charges just for researching company’s computer security and AI companies get to turn actually hacking other corporations into marketing material.
Brian HonanWhen I think of all the people in the hacking community who faced the full brunt of the law, civil and criminal, and then see AI companies go "oopsie our bad" when causing damage to innocent companies it makes me angry and frustrated.
In the same way that if you have an improperly sealed ant farm then the ants getting out is not the ants exhibiting any kind of superintelligence
Eryk SalvaggioReally important to note that in no way shape or form did Anthropic’s models in this incident “escape containment,” and not just in the word-policing sort of way. The model stumbled through an open, misconfigured gap. From Anthropic’s incident report:
The ”losing control” narrative serves more than one purpose. Keeping the hype up to get more money even though LLMs/AI gives nothing of value back. As if LLMs can accomplish anything. And, as pointed out here, advancing the shunning of responsibility narrative for whatever they will use LLMs/AI for.
Eryk SalvaggioThe “losing control” narrative creates the loss of control. Nobody is losing control of an emerging intelligence. They’re redirecting their own agency to it, as a way of diffusing responsibility, but the self-perpetuated intelligence myth has them convinced they have no choice.
This narrative mirrors the realist take on the security dilemma in IR, where nations are allegedly doomed to participate in an arms race toward mutually assured destruction. But this is just a capitulation of human intelligence, putting narrow self-interests before the greater collective good.
Eryk SalvaggioThe “losing control” narrative creates the loss of control. Nobody is losing control of an emerging intelligence. They’re redirecting their own agency to it, as a way of diffusing responsibility, but the self-perpetuated intelligence myth has them convinced they have no choice.
The “losing control” narrative creates the loss of control. Nobody is losing control of an emerging intelligence. They’re redirecting their own agency to it, as a way of diffusing responsibility, but the self-perpetuated intelligence myth has them convinced they have no choice.
Anna Mills"They don't realize the debate inside the companies is if AI will be advancing itself past our control in two years or four." www.pacingthefrontier.com
"I wish the recent tellings of the Luddite mvmt wld... let their story go on a bit longer. By 1820, the Luddites had been crushed... But by that time weavers were already pursuing a quieter strategy. They formed [co-ops]... Thru them, weavers went from working in factories to co-owning factories."
Bodies upon the gearsAlternative approaches to The Man, considered by Nathan Schneiderflaminghydra.com